Yellow and Confused by Ming-Cheau Lin

Author:Ming-Cheau Lin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kwela
Published: 2019-07-16T06:45:04+00:00

Changes

After a year of studying at Vega, I chose to specialise in visual communications for second year – art direction and design.

About six months into second year, I went through a mental health breakdown.

One of my close college mates, Michael23, had committed suicide. Michael and I had both felt conflicted around our specialisation choices and we were both considering a switch. We planned to make the change together – me from vis comm to copywriting and Michael from the same specialisation to multimedia. There were only the two of us who were submitting new portfolios to apply for a change, so we spent a lot of time together discussing our choices and supporting each other. I spoke to him about my identity crisis and anxiety, while he spoke to me about depression and his lack of drive for life. I had similar feelings to those he expressed but I never knew it was a problem … or maybe I just didn’t have the courage to admit that it was. Just after we changed specialities, we heard that Michael had gassed himself in his car on the side of a road on a mountain. He had died peacefully.

Our class was distraught. We all had individual friendships with him due to his sweet and sensitive nature, but because I had most recently spent so much time with him before he died, for me it was quite overwhelming. As a class rep, I organised a student gathering to celebrate Michael’s life. We wrote letters to him and burned them at the beach together. I cried while I wrote my letter. I told Michael how sorry I was that he was in pain. I said that the world wasn’t a place for people like us, that I didn’t judge or blame him for what he’d done, that I felt honoured that he’d shared so much time with me before leaving. Even though I had entirely different reasons, I realised how similar to him I actually felt and that it could easily have been me in that car. The desire to leave all the mess behind was tempting. Was it worth it continually to live with the confusion and displacement that created such unhappiness, such a depressive state? I couldn’t answer this question then, and I still struggle to truly answer it today, but the experience pushed me to search for the questions and anwers to explain the realities of my existence.

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